Cartoon created by Samuel Pritchard-Torres
At a young age, my parents taught me that having Asperger’s Syndrome was not something to exploit but to overcome. I had concentration issues, couldn’t interact with people well, was obsessive on subjects to the point of annoyance for most people, and had emotional issues of depression and anger. In some ways, I still have these symptoms.
When I was diagnosed as a kid, I would get into all sorts of trouble, not understanding why I couldn’t just do that. It was difficult; I was antisocial and wasn’t happy no matter what class I was in, as I was put in mixed classes of special needs development and more traditional ones. For both, I prefered to sit far away from people.
Drawing started as a therapeutic act for me and it’s something I’ve been doing since I was 10 years old. I didn’t get a lot of encouragement from teachers, though, as I drew really ugly stick figures for the most part. However, it didn’t matter to me.
It started as something to play with, but it evolved into something I could use to concentrate. Doodling characters around my notes while I took notes helped me form associations with what I was studying.
Concentration was always challenging for me, a symptom of Asperger’s. I didn’t want to focus on most subjects, unless I had an obsessive interest in something, then I would be laser focused on it. I would take medicine to help me study, but it didn’t help much. When I had to repeat the fourth grade, I decided to stop taking it and would try to learn how to concentrate on my own.
I wanted to do more with my art, as it overtime became more and more my favorite thing to do. I didn’t get much help in class, so I decided to self teach myself how to draw. At a book fair, I saw a “How to Draw Anime” book and worked from there.
Eventually as I got more into drawing, I started going through my dad’s comics; the first I ever read was the original “The Mask.” It was something very unlike the movie but I loved the style, flow and action portrayed in each panel. My love of comics started there and I explored it starting from superheroes, to humor, and then the hardcore underground works.
In high school, I started just going to regular classes, and when I did, I never told anybody I had Asperger’s. When people knew, they treated me different. So I was scared to lose people, thinking maybe if they didn’t know better, they’d think I was just a very awkward kid.
In Drama Club in my freshmen year, I met my best friend Chris, who was working on finding actors for his movies he wrote and directed. After a while we started writing scripts and stories together, and even when I eventually told him about my diagnosis, he still never treated me differently. In fact, this comic is based on a real experience of when I told him the first time.
When I got serious about making comics, I never really knew how to get a project going. It would be a lot like waves on the beach. I’d begin, reach a certain point in a story, run into a problem, and save nothing but instead start all over again, and repeat the stages.
Working at Student Media has helped me to create a good work ethic, having to bring in multiple strips on time for every issue, teaching me the discipline of a deadline and the chance to test my writing and art style. It’s allowed me to finish two of my own amateur comic books.
I’ve been doing comics at FIU Student Media for over two years and I love every minute of it. As a person who lives with Asperger’s Syndrome, I want the people to not define people by their disability. Once you accept someone as a person, they can flourish and become even stronger.
Samuel Pritchard-Torres, senior, Fine Arts major has worked with FIU Student Media for two years and has submitted multiple cartoon strips for the Life and Opinion sections. Pritchard-Torres started drawing cartoons when he was twelve years old has been designing cartoons ever since.
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